Synopsys Successfully Designs Software That Makes Chips More Efficient

Synopsys, successfully revolutionized chip manufacturing. (photo: unsplash)

JAKARTA - Synopsys Inc., a software company, said on Monday that one of its customers used artificial intelligence software to gain a 26% gain in the power efficiency of computer chips. This technological leap usually has to wait for a new generation of chip-making technology.

Modern computing chips are made of billions of transistors and wires laid on a nail-sized piece of silicon. How you place all the elements on a chip, along with other design and architectural choices, has a huge impact on how well it performs and how much it costs.

Big chip companies like Intel Corp or Nvidia Corp can spend two years and hundreds of millions of dollars perfecting their designs. Synopsys is one of the main software makers used to do the job.

The company has begun weaving an artificial intelligence called DSO.ai into its flagship chip design suite to help chip designers get better, faster results, while trying to balance trade-offs on speed, power efficiency and cost to meet their business goals.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Renesas Electronics Corp have started using it. Samsung last year said it had cut a chip design step that would take months to weeks.

On Monday, Synopsys said the AI system could now calculate what software would eventually run on a chip to squeeze more profit. The unnamed cloud computing provider gets a 26% gain in power efficiency over the best solutions human designers have come up with.

In the past, such advantages came from a new generation of chip manufacturing technology that would come every two years, not purely by design. "New software can squeeze more out of existing chip factories," said Aart de Geus, chief executive of Synopsys.

"This is important because today's design is actually more possible than before," de Geus told Reuters in an interview.